Tag: "Ellen Ratner"

WASHINGTON –– Rasmussen Reports president Scott Rasmussen is famous for his polling and understanding trends and people’s views. However, not everyone knows that he has a background in media and just began a radio show heard on weekends in Washington, DC and Chicago. I met up with Scott in the green room at Fox News Channel where he was doing one of his many media appearances.

First, a little history. Rasmussen Reports began as an opinion polling firm that published its results. Back in the mid-1990s Rasmussen began putting the results of his polling on the internet and he says he found “there was a tremendous appetite because people cared about the topics we polled about and wanted to know what their friends and neighbors were thinking.”

Rasmussen says these polls are scientific surveys. Most of the interviews are conducted via the phone and since growing numbers of people are abandoning land lines, they are reaching them in different ways as well. They collect a random group of people all around the country and make sure the sample they get reflects the nation’s population in terms of gender, age, race, political party and geographic location. Rasmussen tells TALKERS, “One of the things that is important in any kind of scientific survey is being a randomly selected group. That’s the way you get the results. The way you test to see if the poll works is to see in the real world what things the poll predicted actually happened. The most obvious example is comparing poll results to election results.”